Quotes from Yann Martel

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud .

The sky was black and spitting rain on my smiling face.

What are we without the ones we love?

Motivul pentru care moartea se Å£ine atât de aproape de via?? nu e necesitatea biologic? - e invidia. ViaÅ£a este atât de frumoas?, încât moartea s-a îndr?gostit de ea, o dragoste geloas?, posesiv?, care apuc? tot ce poate.

Readers will easily recognize the cover of a book they've read, but in a cafe that man over there, is that...is that...well, it's hard to tell - doesn't he have long hair? - oh, he's gone.

It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. - Life of Pi

communion with God in the middle of bags of flour

The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada, I used my fingers. The waiter looked at me critically and said, Fresh off the boat are you? I blanched. My fingers which had seconds before had been taste buds savoring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gaze. They froze like criminals caught in the act. I didn't dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh.

At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine — and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When

Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone. And that is what he is doing: becoming someone.

I would return home to la maison, feminine where, as likely as not, I would go to my room, la chambre, where I would settle to read un livre masculine, until supper. During the masculine meal, feminine food would be eaten. After my hard, productive masculine day, I would rest during the feminine night. At one time, for a few days, I even took an affected aversion to being in the kitchen, la cuisine.

And where in the automobile is the offal that so offends with the horse? There is none, only a puff of smoke that vanishes in the air. An automobile is as harmless as a cigarette. Mark my words, Tomás: This century will be remembered as the century of the puff of smoke!

and so it goes with God.

On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, 'Gosh, life is racing by.' But that's not it at all, it's the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.

Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

To my mind, faith is like being in the sun. When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow? Can you shake that area of darkness that clings to you, always shaped like you, as if to constantly remind you of yourself? You can't. This shadow is doubt. And it goes wherever you go as long as you stay in the sun. And who wouldn't want to be in the sun?

Când ai suferit foarte mult în via??, fiecare durere în plus poate fi atât neînsemnat?, cât ÅŸi de nesuportat

The multitude of the curious and the offended descends upon him.

Art is water, and just as humans are always close to water, for reasons of necessity (to drink, to wash, to flush away, to grow) as well as for reasons of pleasure (to play in, to swim in, to relax in front of, to sail upon, to suck on frozen, coloured and sweetened), so humans must always be close to art in all its incarnations, from the frivolous to the essential. Otherwise we dry up.

To me religion is about our dignity not our depravity

That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, . . . it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker.

Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate . To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away

HIs life was always a happenstance.